Age of insecurity: Trouble in so many places

When I read the recent submissions deadline email from the Ambler, I considered asking for a Papal Dispensation to allow me to miss the deadline and send this copy of my ramblings after the results of the U.S. elections. I decided not to do so. My mind turned to recent events, including the Trump/Clinton saga. It could well provide the storyline for a horror play in a few years time: (Or will it be a horror movie?) Even the stock markets have taken fright at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency!

If we look farther afield at Aleppo, Mosul, the plight of the Yazidi people, cyber- attacks, earthquakes in Italy, the razing of the jungle and the dispersal of its inhabitants, we see trouble in so many places.

What about things nearer to home? Our prisons are at breaking point, with addiction and violence never far away. It seems that Universal Credit may not be quite so universal after all, and that many vulnerable people could find life very difficult. Our Victorian ancestors divided poor people into the Deserving and Undeserving poor. Heaven help you if you were Undeserving!

Of course fears over Brexit and its economic consequences will be with us for years. The common feature of the things I’ve written about above is that we just don’t know how everything will pan out. So what’s new? We’ve NEVER been able to look ahead with certainty about anything – apart from Death and Taxes!

Many of us are optimists, as I keep saying ad-nauseam, and we fully expect that we’ll be able to rub along quite nicely thank you very much. We don’t like to think of bad things that could happen to us, and yet we take out insurance policies. My personal insurance policy, as I’ve said so often, is to try to keep as healthy as I can, to find interesting things to do, to be with people I like as often as I can, and to thank my lucky stars for the Good Things in my life.